Although Angela Brown and Carl Tanner, who sing the roles of Aida and RadamÃ¨s in Opera Pacific's production of Verdi's popular masterpiece this week, met only when rehearsals began a couple of weeks ago, they already get along swimmingly.

But it can't be an easy thing meeting your love interest for the first time, in this case someone you'll end up dying with onstage.

"Well, basically, I'm hoping he has good breath," Brown says, laughing. "That is definitely an issue - you sing into each other's faces."

Brown, dressed in black and donning a black beret and dramatic turquoise earrings, and Tanner, looking more casual in a Hawaiian shirt, were sitting for an interview in a local hotel suite recently. It turns out that they have a lot in common - careers that took a while to get going (neither intended to be an opera singer), odd jobs on the way up, the death of siblings (both had brothers, Tanner's adopted, who died at 18), religious devotion. Even their surnames - Brown and Tanner - bear a colorful correlation. "We hit it off right off the bat," Tanner says. "I mean, we were kind of old souls."

The death of Brown's younger brother actually changed the direction of her life. Searching for answers, she became a Seventh Day Adventist and decided she wanted to be a singing evangelist. She went to Oakwood College, in Huntsville, Ala., a hotbed of gospel singing, expressly to be one. But classical music was also a part of her curriculum there and it became apparent that the young singer had a rare gift. "You will be a great Verdian soprano," one of her teachers predicted. "And I was like, 'Yeah, yeah, whatever,'" Brown says. "But that did put a little spark under me."

Soon enough she was the go-to singer for local classical events, which provided another spark. "People started wanting to pay me," Brown says. "I said, 'Oh, I could get a check? Let me think about this opera thing some more.'"

Tanner, too, took a little convincing. "There was a calling for me to be an opera singer," he says, "and I ran from it for years." Though armed with a music degree from tiny Shenandoah Conservatory of Music, in Winchester, Va. - he did it for his mother, Tanner says - the self-styled "good old boy" was making his living as a truck driver and bounty hunter (surely, the only tenor ever to do so) and living at home.

Tanner often listened to the radio while driving the truck, and somehow the station always ended up on opera. He sang along. One day, Tanner recalls, a woman in a car heard him and honked her horn. "She said 'Is that you singing?'... And I said, 'Oh a little bit me and the radio,' and she said, 'You know what you're supposed to do' and she drove off." It made him think.

But a couple of bounty hunting incidents turned him to singing for good. One was being shot at 17 times by a teenager (who missed). A week later, Tanner chased another man into a building. Trapped, the man jumped out of a fourth floor window, killing himself.

"The next day I turned in my resignation and went to counseling for about two or three weeks," Tanner says, "and then moved to New York, with 70 bucks and a bag of clothes, to be an opera singer."

Growing into Verdi

Brown is one of operadom's bigger stories in recent years. In fall 2004, replacing a sick colleague, she stepped into a production of "Aida" at the Metropolitan Opera, creating a sensation. "At last an Aida," the New York Times exuded in its review. A critic at Opera News called her performance "the best Met Aida I've heard since Leontyne Price's farewell performances."

Brown is no overnight success - she'd studied the role for a decade, she's paid her dues - but the Met "Aida" has launched her career into the big time. Tanner, too, is increasingly in demand in the better opera houses around the world.

Good Verdi singers, it is generally agreed, are hard to come by these days. The peculiar demands that the composer places on many of his singers - the ability to sing loudly over a full symphony orchestra at one moment, to sing with a beautiful lyrical line the next, and to sing softly and beautifully the next - prove an impossible combination for many.

Both Brown and Tanner, now in their early 40s, feel the shortage of Verdians is due to the abuse of young singers.

"They're not given the time to really blossom and to grow into these Verdian singers," Brown says. Vocalists who develop big voices in their 20s are forced into roles they shouldn't be singing so early. "If they had said, 'Angela, go out there and sing Aida' and I was all of 25, 27, you blow your wad quick, you know, you're a real fast burn. Because you don't know what it really does take to be an Aida all night long, go home rest one night and do it again. You have to be an adult, a mature, grown person."

ANGELA BROWN: The singer is celebrated for her portrayal of the title role in “Aida.” She brings it to Orange County this week.
DOOMED LOVER: Carl Tanner rehearses as Radamès in Opera Pacific’s production of “Aida” last week. He’ll sing the role Tuesday and Saturday.
RIVALS FOR LOVE: Angela Brown, as Aida, and Milena Kitic, as Amneris, the king’s daughter, are rivals for the love of Radamès.

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